Complicating, not explicating: Taking up philosophy in learning disability research

Paper submitted to:

Learning Disability Quarterly

Julie Allan

University of Stirling

Stirling Institute of Education

Stirling

FK9 4LA

Scotland

Tel: +44 1786 467622

Fax: +44 1786 467633

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Abstract

This article provides an introduction to some theoretical ideas and practices from the so-called “philosophers of difference” – Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari. They afford an opportunity to think differently about the construction of learning disability and to envision new forms of learning. Two key concepts – Foucault’s transgression and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome – are introduced and examples from research on learning disability and other dimensions of disability are given to illustrate their potential. The theoretical practices of deconstruction, developed by Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic analysis are also presented and exemplified. I argue that these these theoretical concepts and practices, if taken up, shift the researcher towards an ethics of research and to greater responsibility. The implications of this are discussed in the final part of the paper.
Introduction

This paper proposes some new forms of engagement with theory in research on learning disability. These provide the prospect of “thinking otherwise” (Ball, 1994, p. 23) and enabling us as academics to meet our responsibilities towards students identified as having learning disabilities more effectively.In advocating a more extensive engagement with theory, I am suggesting some particular associations, most notably with a group of French philosophers known as the philosophers of difference. Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Foucault have been portrayed as philosophers of difference because of their concern with achieving recognition of minority social groups and because they all, in differing ways, attempt to formulate a politics of difference based on an acceptance of multiplicity (Patton, 2000). Each of these writers have in common an orientation to philosophy as a political act and a will to make use of philosophical concepts as a form, not of global revolutionary change, but of “active experimentation, since we do not know in advance which way a line is going to turn” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 137). Their work is a philosophy of affirmation, which is a “belief of the future, in the future” (Deleuze, quoted in Rajchman, 2001, p. 76). It does not offer solutions, but rather produces new concepts, “provocation” (Bains, 2002), and new imaginings, “knocking down partitions, co-extensive with the world” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 22).

The ideas of the philosophers of difference are made to work in a practical sense in two ways. First, the ideas themselves are taken and are used to provoke a different kind of sense-making within the field of learning disability. It is not, however, a simple task to see, think and act differently; it is necessary, therefore to also use some of the theory practices of the philosophers of difference to help achieve a new orientation to research methodology (Allan, 2008). A brief ‘taste’ of two key ideas of the philosophers of difference – transgression and the rhizome - is provided below, together with some examples of how these have been used to reflect upon current ways of thinking about and discussing people with learning disabilities and to “relocate them in new words and worlds” (Granger, 2010). Two major theory practices which could be taken up in research within learning disability – deconstruction and rhizomic analysis – are also outlined and exemplified. The examples are drawn from the US, the UK and Australia and relate to learning disability and other dimensions of disability. In the UK and Australia, learning disability (or intellectual disability) has a different provenance and politics from that in the US (Sleeter, 1987) and is deployed across a greater proportion of student population. It is hoped that in spite of these differences, the examples will illustrate the powerful capacity of these philosophical theories to inspire new thought. The utilisation of these concepts and practices take the researcher into a new kind of engagement within the field of learning disability which can best be described, drawing again on the philosophers of difference and on Levinas (1969), as an ethics. The implications of an ethical engagement in learning disability research are discussed in the final part of the paper.

Transgression

Many researchers are familiar with, and have even used, Foucault’s concepts of power and knowledge to explore, often to very good effect, the way in which individuals with learning disabilities and other kinds of special needs are controlled and constrained within schooling contexts (Allan, 1999; Reid & Valle, 2004; Tremain, 2005). Whilst such analyses provide important insights, they offer little hope that individuals can escape such constraints. Foucault’s still relatively unexplored later works on ethics enables the examination of how disabled people can and do challenge their constraints and his notion of transgression is particularly helpful in this regard. Transgression, the practical and playful resistance to limits (Foucault, 1994), is an important way for disabled people to challenge the disabling barriers they encounter. Transgression is not antagonistic or aggressive, nor does it involve a contest in which there is a victor; rather, it allows disabled individuals to shape their own identities by subverting the norms which compel them to repeatedly perform as marginal. For those who transgress, according to Boyne (1990), “otherness lies ahead” (p. 82) and they are not required to – and indeed could not – reject these identities entirely, but can vary the way in which they have to repeat these performances.

Evidence of transgression by disabled students emerged in my own work (Allan, 1999) as something of a surprise. The research focused on experiences of students with special needs, and their mainstream peers, in regular schools, and, in line with Foucauldian genealogies of power and knowledge, I had expected to find students who were constrained and controlled by the discourses and practices of special education. This indeed was the case and the hierarchies of surveillance through the assessment procedures and teaching practices had significant disciplinary effects on the young people and their families. However, the disabled students also transgressed these effects in particularly subtle and effective ways. Raschida, a visually impaired student, first alerted me to the extent and scope of transgression, beaming as she described how the long cane which she hated, because it was so visible, had been ‘dropped’ in a lake. The loss of the long cane, she reported gleefully, had annoyed her teachers, but had enabled her to escape the imperative to perform her visual impairment in public. She had subsequently acquired a smaller folding cane which was much less obvious and with which she was more comfortable. Raschida also described an episode of transgression in which she pretended to be ‘blind drunk,’ rather than blind, when she was with her boyfriend:

I usually met him at nights and that and he was [drunk] … I used to always pretend that I was drunk as well. I [wasn’t] really, but I was just saying that he’d think, if I couldn’t see anything, he’d realize [laughs] … I decided to tell him. Because we used to meet up at my friend’s house and I knew her house quite well as well, so I never used to bang into things or anything, I’d just act normal, casual (Allan, 1999, p. 106).

Transgressive strategies surfaced among students with a ‘learning disabled’ or ‘learning difficulties’ label, although, as has already been made clear these descriptive categories, having emerged in the UK through routes of mental retardation and mental handicap, have had less of the political and ideological significance than learning disability has had in the United States. One student, Brian, who had Down’s syndrome, orchestrated a subtle shift in the extent of the presence of his learning disability depending on which of his special needs assistant was on duty. He appeared to exhibit a more significant degree of learning disability and dependency with his afternoon – somewhat mothering – assistant which contrasted with his morning experiences when the assistant who took a more disciplinarian approach was present. Dudley-Marling (2004), in his research, illustrates how powerfully the teachers’ positioning of students and whether they identify them positively or in relation to their deficits can have on their responses and Brian’s reaction demonstrates this as well as highlighting the capacity of students to transgress. Brian also transgressed in his relationships with other students, appearing to cross the line of normal boundaries of touch with one student in particular. What was striking was the mainstream students’ capacities to recognise and tolerate such transgression but to also seek to turn such encounters into pedagogic instances where they were able to support Brian’s inclusion.

Researchers have uncovered instances of students transgressing in ways which made them seem more disabled. Ferri and Connor (2009) demonstrated the powerful capacity of young working class women of colour to transgress into learning disability through a recognition of the perceived advantages it offered. They also uncovered a variety of sophisticated strategies by the young women to evade the unwanted attention of peers and found that “passing, rather than signalling an internalisation of stigma or self-hatred, serves as a tactic for negotiating what is perceived as an invasion of privacy and for refusing ableist assumptions” (Ferri & Connor, 2009, p. 109). In my own research reported above, Peter, who had behavioural difficulties, regularly referred to himself as “a spastic” (Allan, 1999, p. 54) and described how he would “sometimes say things to shock people” (Allan, 1999, p. 54). As with Brian, Peter’s fellow students demonstrated their ability and willingness to make some space for such transgressive acts and to try to support his inclusion.

Granger (2010) describes how she transgressed her learning disabled identity, as it had been formed for her by her teachers, and which characterised failure on her part. Her initial self loathing at what she had been told she could not do was replaced by a recognition of the uses of social power that had produced that hate. She acquired a “ghostly presence” that “threatened to disrupt” and took great satisfaction in whispering to her fellow students that it was not necessary to conform: “this shit doesn’t matter”. Granger’s account is a powerful call to “transform silence about our denigration, to outrage about this denigration and a celebration of who we are”.

These acts of transgression enabled individuals to challenge the limits placed upon them and exercise control over themselves and others. They were also largely positive acts, which challenge the idea that passing or evading an identification as disabled is shameful. The transgressions were, however, temporary and partial, had to be constantly repeated and reactions to them had to be monitored. Transgression appears to have value as a concept in helping to understand ways in which learning disabled individuals may challenge and resist practices within school. It allows us to find a way of reading these, not as further evidence of pathology, but as positive expression and as desire.

The rhizome

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offer the rhizome as a model of thought, which challenges both conventional knowledge and the means of acquiring this knowledge. According to Deleuze and Guattari, conventional knowledge is rigid, striated and hierarchical and has an “arborescent” or tree like structure. Learning within such a structure involves the transfer of knowledge through a process of representation, “which articulates and hierarchizes tracings” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12) and emphasises facts and students are required to display their learning merely through repetition of these facts, with little opportunity for variation. Knowledge of this kind relies on the logic of binarism for example normal/abnormal or able/disabled, and places these hierarchically within the system, identifying those on the negative side of the binary as targets for remediation and control. This kind of learning is inadequate because it is partial, with meaning being lost through continual fracturing. Students’ involvement in these learning processes is also partial, contingent, and tied to individuals’ pathologies, which in turn fragment and locate students within the striations of the school system.

In place of the arborescent tree structure of knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari propose the notion of a rhizome, which grows or moves in messy and unpredictable ways. Their examples of rhizomes include bulbs or tubers, but also rats and burrows: “the best and the worst” (1987, p. 7). Rhizomes have multiple connections, lines and points of rupture, but no foundation or essence, and the connectivity of these lines make a rejection of binarism inevitable:

That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject – anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 9).

The rhizome as a model of learning “releases us from the false bondage of linear relationships” (Roy, 2003, p. 90) and allows for endless proliferation, new lines of flight and new forms of knowledge:

Expression must break forms, encourage ruptures and new sproutings. When a form is broken, one must reconstruct the content that will necessarily be part of a rupture in the order of things (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 28).

Each rhizome contains:

lines of segmentation according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc.; but also lines of deterritorialization along which it endlessly flees (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 18).

These “ruptures and new sproutings” present new challenges and new ways of experiencing learning. They are not, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) caution, secure spaces where individuals can be passive but a series of lines in which they must participate: A rhizome, a burrow, yes – but not an ivory tower. A line of escape, yes – but not a refuge (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 41). Rhizomic learning is always in process, having to be constantly worked at by all concerned and never complete. This in-betweenness is an inclusive space in which everyone belongs and where movement occurs. Whilst the rhizome has obvious metaphorical appeal, establishing it as the model for thinking about learning is much more complex:

It is not a matter of exposing the Root and announcing the Rhizome. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. The rhizome is perpetually in construction or collapsing, a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again (Gregoriou, 2004, p. 244).

The concept of the rhizome appeared useful in understanding the learning and experiences of group of children in a school in which the headteacher had introduced children’s rights (Allan et al, 2006). A small group of children was formed to look at inclusion in the school and the group, which called itself the Special Needs Observation Group (SNOG), was initially established by a parent of two disabled children in the school, but the children gradually assumed responsibility for their own activities. The group experienced a form of rhizomic learning in which they experimented with, and experienced, inclusion. They took rights - literally - on a walk through the school in order to discover the points at which exclusion arose. Simulation exercises of this kind, in which non-disabled individuals pretend to be disabled, can be superficial and essentialist, but these young people directed their gaze to the disabling barriers and found themselves able to imagine the exclusion experienced by their disabled peers. This kind of learning about rights seemed to be particularly effective because it took them off in new and unanticipated directions. Having dealt with disability, the group decided to move onto ethnicity, and identified some concerns about the level of participation of some individuals. They then decided to tackle weight issues when they became aware of some of their peers’ discomfort when changing for gym. Their experience and experimentation with rights had alerted them to new forms of exclusion that they wished to do something about.

For one young person, Alistair, the experience of being part of the SNOG group, and of rhizomic learning, was particularly significant in rescuing him from a downward spiral of misbehaviour and exclusion. He described himself as having been out of control, often getting into trouble in the playground for fighting and being regularly excluded. Prior to joining SNOG, he had become a buddy to a disabled child and being responsible for someone else had made him alter his own behaviour. His membership of SNOG had, by his own account, transformed him into someone else, someone who had to have regard for others, and had allowed him to escape the deviant identity that was being ascribed to him. It was a dramatic line of flight:

Well, when I started to know [disabled students] I was, like, I need to show them I want to be good, ‘cos I used to get into fights and stupid things like that but when I started to get to know them and got into the SNOG group I started my behaviour; I wanted to start again and be good … I didn’t want everybody to know me as Alistair the bad boy. I want to be good now. So that’s what I was trying to do when I went into the SNOG group … sometimes I’m amazing (Allan & I’Anson, 2005, p. 133).